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Coronavirus variants get Greek names — but will scientists use them?
When researchers in South Africa spotted a highly mutated strain of coronavirus driving the country’s second wave in late 2020, they called it variant 501Y.V2. Naming schemes developed by other scientists have called it B.1.351, 20H/501Y.V2 and GH/501Y.V2. But many media outlets — and some scientists — describe the same virus as ‘the South African variant’.
To quell such confusion and avoid geographical stigmas, everyone should now just call it ‘Beta’, according to a naming scheme announced on 31 May by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and described in a forthcoming article in Nature Microbiology.
Variants of concern
WHO label | Pango lineage | GISAID clade | Nextstrain clade | Earliest documented samples | Date of designation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Alpha | B.1.1.7 | GRY | 20I/S:501Y.V1 | UK, Sept 2020 | Dec 2020 |
Beta | B.1.351 | GH/501Y.V2 | 20H/S:501Y.V2 | South Africa, May 2020 | Dec 2020 |
Gamma | P.1 | GR/501Y.V3 | 20J/S:501Y.V3 | Brazil, Nov 2020 | Jan 2021 |
Delta | B.1.617.2 | G/452R.V3 | 21A/S:478K | India, Oct 2020 | May 2021 |
The names, taken from the Greek alphabet (see ‘Variants of concern’), are not intended to replace scientific labels, but will serve as a handy shorthand for policymakers, the public and other non-experts who are increasingly losing track of different variant names.
“It is a lot easier for a radio newsreader to say ‘Delta’ than bee-one-six-one-seven-two,” says Jeffrey Barrett, a statistical geneticist leading SARS-CoV-2-sequencing efforts at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK. “So I’m willing to give it a try to help it take off.”
“Let’s hope it sticks,” says Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician and director of the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform in Durban, South Africa, whose team identified the Beta variant. “I find the names quite simple and easy.”
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Nature 594, 162 (2021)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01483-0
‘A bloody mess’: Confusion reigns over naming of new COVID variants
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